“The camera got through safely”: photography and women’s memory activism after the Irish Civil War and Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT

This article takes a comparative approach to gendered legacies of civil war and militant women’s post-war memory activism in Ireland and Spain, and highlights a shared practice of photographic memory-keeping as a means of constructing counter-narratives of war. It focuses specifically on the testimonial memoirs “Blaze Away with your Little Gun” (1968–69) by Siobhán and Mairead de Paor and Cárcel de Mujeres (Vol. 1 and 2, 1985) and Mujeres en la Resistencia (1968) by Tomasa Cuevas, which commemorated women’s experiences of activism and imprisonment in the Irish Civil War and Spanish Civil War respectively. This article unpacks how militant women on the losing side of civil war navigated the gendered repression and enforced erasure of the post-war Irish Free State and Francoist dictatorship and uses the two case studies to demonstrate that women’s photographic practices enabled them to contest national narratives of war. It thus highlights how women’s testimonial photographic practices, the ways in which they created, re-defined, and circulated images within written memoirs, allowed them to reclaim agency over their experiences of activism and imprisonment and commemorate women who were otherwise erased from official remembrance.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• civil war
• photography
• memory
• Ireland
• Spain

Acknowledgments

The writer would like to thank Dr Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Dr Evan Smith, Dr Jimmy Yan, and Dr Eline Tabak for their support in the writing of this paper, and Dr Scott Soo, Dr Erika Hanna, and Dr Jane Lavery for their support on the research process. She would also like to thank the Irish Newspaper Archives and the Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses for their permission to reproduce the photographs in this articles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For more on state commemorations in Ireland and Spain see: Higgins, Transforming 1916, 30–56; and Ryan, “For Whom the Dominant Memory Tolls,” 128.

2. Edwards, “Objects of Affect,” 222.

3. Rigney, “Remembering Hope,” 372.

4. Higgins, “Curators of Memory,” 211.

5. Gómez Morcillo, The Seduction of Modern Spain, 92.

6. O’Brien, “All the News,” 5.

7. Nolan, “The Invisible Army,” 35.

8. A review of Insurrection in the Dubliner’s Diary highlighted the importance of this representation of O’Farrell, arguing that otherwise she may have “receded into the company of the ghosts of Easter Week.” Dubliner’s Diary, 14 June 1968 in UCD, MS P106/1557.

9. Fisher, Women Political Prisoners, 92.

10. Yusta Rodrigo, “Hombres Armados,” 291.

11. Connolly, The Irish Women’s, 59.

12. Herrmann, “Voices of the Vanquished,” 12.

13. Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 12.

14. Aiken, “The Woman’s Weapon,” 89–90.

15. For example: Townshend, The Republic, 451; and Ruiz, Franco’s Justice, 9.

16. Valiulis, “Defining Their Role,” 43; Carbayo-Abengo, “Shaping Women,” 88.

17. Thébaud, “Understanding Twentieth-Century Wars,” 155.

18. Overviews of feminist approaches to Irish revolutionary history can be found in: Connolly, Women and the Irish Revolution; Frawley, Women and the Decade of Commemorations. For an overview of feminist approaches to the Spanish Civil War, see: Martínez López and Nash, “ARENAL, 20 Años de Historia”; and Rus, “Mujeres y Guerra Civil.”

19. Connolly, Women and the Irish Revolution, 6; Linhard, Fearless Women, 3; Rodríguez López, “Fallen Militia Women,” 3–5.

20. Valiulis, “Power, Gender and Identity,”120; and Graham, The Spanish Republic At War, 29.

21. Amor, “Construcciones de la Subjetividad Femenina,” 151–2.

22. Coleman, “Compensating Irish Female Revolutionaries,” 918–20; Ryan, “Furies and Die-Hards,” 270; and Aiken, “Sick on the Irish Sea,” 91.

23. Richards, A Time of Silence, 52–64.

24. Ryan, “Furies and Die-Hards,” 263.

25. Hernández Holgado, Mujeres Encarceladas, 132–3.

26. Osborne, “Good Girls,” 511.

27. Fisher, Women Political Prisoners, 29; and McAtackney, “Sensory Deprivation,” 302.

28. For a representative example of Irish and Spanish war photographic history, see: Baylis, “What to Wear,” 94–122; Carville, “Dusty Fingers,” 235–48; Rosón Villena and Douglas. “The Things They Carried,” 459–83; and Moreno Andrés, El Duelo Revelado.

29. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 27

30. Assaf and Bock, “The Robert Capa Myth,” 10.

31. Pichel, Picturing the Western Front, 210–11

32. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 55–8.

33. Fitzpatrick, “Portraits and Propaganda,” 82–90; and Brothers, War and Photography, 76–8.

34. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 105–9.

35. Rosón Villena and Douglas, “The Things They Carried,” 465–6.

36. Ryan, Gender, Identity and Irish Press, 242–3.

37. Hall, “Irish Republican Women in Australia,” 102.

38. Gómez Morcillo, The Seduction of Modern Spain, 15.

39. Solé, “Executed Women, Assassinated Women,” 74.

40. Ann Rigney, “Afterword,” 299–304.

41. See: Chidgey, Feminist Afterlives; Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie, Remembering Women’s Activism; and Gül Altınay et al., Women Mobilizing Memory.

42. Gutman and Wüstenberg, “Challenging the Meaning,” 1070–86.

43. Smits, “A Network of Photographs,” 184–203.

44. Rose, “Practising Photography,” 555–6.

45. Oldfield, “Calling the Shots,” 19.

46. Rigney, “Remaking Memory,” 18.

47. Edwards, Raw Histories, 4.

48. Finnerty, “The Republican Mother,” 220; and Ryan, “Splendidly Silent,” 36–38.

49. de Paor, “Blaze Away,” 4 January 1969.

50. White, “Propaganda for Peace,” 129–30.

51. de Paor, “Blaze Away,” 4 January 1969.

52. Baylis, “The Photographic Portrait,” 3–4.

53. Carville, “Dusty Fingers of Time,” 240.

54. Hanna, Snapshot Stories, 61–3.

55. Beaumont, “How a Photograph”; and Moreno Andrés, El Duelo Revelado, 86.

56. Ghosh and Goodall, “The Past in the Present,” 56.

57. García-Funes, “El Semanario Redención,” 124–33.

58. Cuevas, Testimonios de Mujeres, 509–28.

59. Hayes, “Introduction: Visual Genders,” 521.

60. Oldfield, “Calling The Shots,” 27.

61. McAtackney, “1916 and After,” 63.

62. Rodríguez López and Cazorla, “Blue Angels,” 2.

63. Hernández, “Rosario, Dinamitera.” English translation by Elizabeth Nash.

64. Cuevas, Testimonios de Mujeres, 179–80.

65. Ibid., 169.

66. Linhard, Fearless Women, 119.

67. Cuevas, Testimonios de Mujeres, 591.

68. Meyer, Men of War, 57.

69. McAuliffe, “Remembered for Being Forgotten,” 22–40; and Yusta Rodrigo, “Hombres Armados,” 285–310.

70. de Paor, “Blaze Away,” 28 December 1968.

71. Kilmainham Gaol Archive, 2010.0249, 31.

72. Noble, “Gender in the Archive,” 146.

73. Hayes, “Introduction,’ 421.

74. Cuevas, Testimonios, 621.

75. Ryan, “Splendidly Silent,” 42.

76. Campt, Image Matters, 7.

77. Gül Altınay, Women Mobilizing Memory, 4–5.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to thank the South West Wales Doctoral Training Partnership and the British Association of Irish Studies for their support of this research.